After years of Flash dragging its heals in the way of offering gamepad support, I’m very excited that Google Chrome (and soon Firefox) offers gamepad support via the Gamepad API. There’s a good breakdown on things in “Jumping the hurdles with the Gamepad API“. Looking forward to trying this out at home (where I have access to a joypad…or 37).

Interesting blog post on eric e. dolecki’s sitehere on the topic of Flash’s survival. I’m not sure how much of an issue poor(er) Flash performance on the Mac is for the guys at Adobe, but considering Flash has performed worse on the Mac for years now I’m guessing it’ll continue to remain somewhere down the list of priorities to sort.

Flash isn’t likely to die anytime soon in my opinion (despite all the HTML5 raving at the moment). Flash’s feature set isn’t as widely available in any browser or plug-in and as all developers having to tailor for IE6 *spits* knows; getting users to upgrade and/or install new software isn’t always straightforward.

While I’d love for Adobe to spend time ensuring what great features currently within Flash are made bulletproof (Mac support, accessibility, etc), Flash’s survival is likely to be largely dependent on what standout features the product supports. Standing still and building upon what’s currently within Flash allows competitors to gain ground, which is why I’m guessing each new version of Flash will continue to showcase cutting edge new features.

Apple have updated Safari to version 3.1 to include support for a lot of cutting-edge technology (including client-side database storage), along with adding a native developer dropdown (enabled within the preferences section). With Firefox 3, Opera 9.5 coming soon and, erm, IE8, it’s looking like the browser market is about to make web developer’s lives a lot more interesting soon.

By “interesting” I of course mean more difficult!

P.S. Visit this page in Safari 3.1 to see some funky CSS animation. Coo!